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OK, FIRST a heads up. Once again thieves are working the beach car parks.

They aren't hard to spot, they keep on the move, yet stay near the car park.

They wear earthy colours and carry a phone and often a backpack.

The modus operandi is they spy someone hiding their keys when going for a surf. Take the keys, clean out your cash and then put the rest back the way it was. You don't realise you've been hit until they are long gone.

Bottom line here folks is we can't afford to be complacent with this.

The only way to beat them is if we are all aware of our fellow surfers, both local and visitors alike.

If you see something that looks suspicious, speak up about it, call the police, and don't rely on hiding your keys under the car, it simply doesn't work any more.

Scotty keeping it smooth while dealing with the crowd antics. Photo Contributed inbyronbaytoday.comContributed

Meanwhile, on the water...

OK, to the waves. We have quite a complex situation out there.

The primary swell is south, small 0.5m but long period (13 sec) so it has some push. There's a secondary short period (5-7 sec) east swell that's slightly larger 1-1.5m but it lacks power and is dropping fast.

Then we also have a weak short period (5 sec) bumpy north-east wind swell around the 1m mark. What this all means is we should get a few peaky waves up around 1-1.5m but no clearly defined swell lines.

It should be inconsistent, lumpy and bumpy as all these different little swell sources work over the top of each other.

There could be waves on the points because of the east and north-east swells.

But they will most likely have annoying closeout sections and the NW/SW winds are not going to help much with that. The beach breaks on the other hand, will benefit from the NW/SW winds.

But it'll be a bit of a lottery as to what hits what bank when.

In other words patience and good wave selection will be handy skills this weekend.

The spanner in the works is the low that will cross the coast tonight or early Saturday down near Tasmania. The high could hold it down there and slowly generate swell, or it may collapse and the whole thing motors up the coast towards us.

It's anyone's guess as to what that system actually does next, but my money is on it stalling and slowly producing south swell later in the week.

The main influence we're most likely to see from that this weekend is a shift from NW 10-15kts to W/SW 15-20kts bringing a considerable drop in temperature on Sunday.